Artists & Scholars

Art

Susan Coop Street ’64 opened a new art gallery, The HQ Gallery in the Arsenal, in her hometown of Benicia, Calif., in early May. Works from 18 artists, including herself, will be shown regularly. The gallery is a place where artists who may not have another venue to show their art can exhibit their works. It’s also a place where more established talent like Nikki Basch-Davis and Lee Wilder Snider will exhibit.

Books

Mike Kleine ’11 published his first play, a one-act titled The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish with Plays Inverse, 2016. He also released his third book, Kanley Stubrick (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2016), a character study.

André Darlington ’98 and his sister Tenaya Darlington freely admit that they are not bartenders, but both have written about food and drink for years. When they’re together, they gravitate to a cocktail venue. One night they got the idea to drink their way through history together and started meeting online — they live 900 miles apart — with shakers for long-distance happy hour. The New Cocktail Hour: The Essential Guide to Hand-Crafted Drinks (Running Press, 2016) is the result of their project.

Jeremy “Sequoia” Nagamatsu ’04 has published his first book, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). “The Return to Monsterland” opens the collection of genre-bending stories inspired by Japanese folklore and pop culture. Demons with marital problems, orientations for neophyte ghosts, the twilight years of legendary heroes, and a dance party in a post-apocalyptic Tokyo populate these pages. Every story turns to the fantastic, the mysticism of the past, and the absurdities of the future to illuminate the spaces we occupy in times of uncertainty.

Walt Giersbach ’61 published his short story, “Test of English as a Foreign Language,” in the January 2016 issue of Mulberry Fork Review. His two volumes of short stories, Cruising the Green of Second Avenue (Wild Child Publishing, 2014), are also available at online retailers.

Jin Feng, professor of Chinese, will research her book, Food Nostalgia in the Lower Yangzi Delta, during her 2015–16 sabbatical. Her project will explore the tension between China’s drive toward modernization and its increasing turn toward cultural conservatism by studying the representations and reinventions of culinary traditions in the lower Yangzi delta. She has been awarded a scholar grant from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange for this project.

Between 1945 and 1964, more than 6 million members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were investigated for misconduct by local party organizations and then reprimanded, demoted from full party membership, or expelled. Party leaders viewed these investigations as a form of moral education and used humiliating public hearings to discipline wrongdoers and send all Soviet citizens a message about how Communists should behave. The High Title of a Communist (Northern Illinois University Press, 2015) is the first study of the Communist Party’s internal disciplinary system in the decades following World War II. Edward Cohn, associate professor of history, uses the practices of expulsion and censure as a window into how the postwar regime defined the ideal Communist and the ideal Soviet citizen.